While I have ceased to be truly astonished by the weird ways that games are put together, this episode of Boundary Break digs into some strangeness around Silent Hill 3 that I just didn’t know about.

The first is that the town of Silent Hill itself loads in “chunks.” This isn’t necessarily surprising, as many games do this for parts of the world when you aren’t looking at them, but there’s something really spooky about Silent Hill not existing until you’re standing in it. Until then it’s just a creepy grey void hidden behind some fog.

The second is that I was not aware of how many re-used assets from Silent Hill 2 are in the game. Shesez claims that the town itself is a recycled asset (which makes sense), but he also highlights the fact that Angela Orosco and James Sunderland make pseudo-cameos in Silent Hill 3. Angela is the head of a diner patron in the game’s opening, and James is subbed in for Harry Mason, the protagonist of the original Silent Hill. These character models from the second game are just conveniently there to be used, and it makes me wonder how compressed together the development times for Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 were.

In any case, like all of the Boundary Break videos, this one is worth watching all the way through to see some of the neat tricks that developers use to bring their worlds together.